The process to add your photos to the latest launch album is significantly different in ClubExpress. Previously you could upload your photos and they would then appear in the current launch photo album by default. At this time, getting your photos into the launch album requires a member-coordinator to do the final steps of publishing your launch photos. The system allows you to upload your photos into a personal photo album. At this time, in order to prevent overwhelming the photo gallery with everyone's personal albums we ask that if you do create personal photo albums for individual launches, that you make sure they are not generally visible. This is done by unchecking the visibility checkbox on album manager sheet at creation time. Personal photo albums you want to look at and/or share with others are not subject to this request. They will appear in the gallery under a title of your choosing given the appropriate display filter.
The short description of the process is:
- Create your member photo album for your launch photos. Give it a title that's reasonably unique eg. myusername_latest_launch_photos
- Upload your photos to this new album.
- Inform website coordinators that you have an album with photos for inclusion into a launch album. This could be done by email or a forum post for example. Be sure to include the album name and the name of the launch album you want your photos referenced in, if it isn't the latest launch album.
- The coordinator will then link your uploaded photos to the desired launch album.
- The coordinator will then de-reference the photos in your member launch album (your photos will still be in storage.)
Your photos, referenced or not, will always be findable by you (unless you specifically delete them) in the "select photos" panel obtained through the "Edit Photo Album" panel (see below)... unless they are intentionally deleted. Deleting a photo album does not delete your photos.
All of this can be accomplished with a single photo album, but I think it would help the site coordinators out immensely if you, the user, kept two photo albums... one visible for your favorite photos, and one not visible for use in adding photos to a specific club launch album.
Now for the details:
Creating A Photo Album
To create a member photo album, start by clicking on your user name in the upper right corner and select "profile":
On your member profile page, scroll down to "Your Website Functions" (last row on the right hand side) and select photo albums (highlighted below).
This will bring you to the user-specific Photo Album Manager. Click the "Add photo album" button and on the resulting "Photo Album Configuration" sheet, deselect the checkbox titled "Visible". The goal is to ultimately have the photos in this album appear in the the general album for a specific launch.
As can be seen the name and menu text are mandatory fields. Give the album a name (Album 1 here). When you click on the "Menu Text" field, it will automatically fill in with the name you gave it. You can change it if you wish. The "Quick Link" field is for easy access to the album. You can fill it in and then you'll be able to directly access the album via http://cmass.org/whatever-string-you-used-as-a-quick-link, but only if it's marked visible. By all means for personal albums, you will likely want this value set. For launch inclusions, the photos will be visible in the launch album of course so it's not needed for this purpose. Fill in a description if you wish and click save.
On save you will see the following:
The newly created album with a few control buttons on the right, the circled "pencil" edits the photo album.
Add Photos to Your Album.
As mentioned, to add photos you will need to edit your new photo album in order to upload and/or add already uploaded photos to this album. Click the pencil icon to bring up the Edit Photo Album sheet:
There are two ways to upload photos... either one at a time or in multiples. The "Add..." buttons will do the upload, the "Select..." will allow you to choose existing photos.
Uploading
When uploading photos it will help immensely if you put in as much information as possible. While not mandatory, addition of unique tags, for example, will help the coordinator to link your photos more expeditiously. PLEASE be kind to your coordinator and add tags!!!! A good format is YYYYMMDD-AuthorName will be much appreciated. Here are the sheets you will get for "Add One Photo" and "Add Multiple Photos":
You will note that in the single photo upload sheet (left), Title and Author are mandatory fields, while in the add multiple photos sheet, there are no required fields. Keep in mind that each photo can be individually edited after the album is loaded to include this information, but here is where it would be best to add your unique tag. You can make a non-master tag simply by typing something in. There may be master tags available and those will show up in the dropdown without you adding your own. The "Select"/"Select Photos" buttons visible will allow you to browse on your computer/device etc. for selection of your photos to upload.
The single file upload is straightforward, so we'll concentrate now on "multi-uploads".
Pushing the "Select Photos" button on you computer or device will give you a file browser that you can then select files. On windows this will be the usual file explorer. You can then multi-select the items you want and press the button marked "Open". The sheet will then upload all the files, and present the results thusly:
It's not likely you're going to recall what each photo is specifically so it may be problematic to enter titles here (unless you have a generic title you'd care to apply). Notice that the tag (which was simply typed in as it appears... don't worry there was no March 15th launch here) is now in this framed entry. This tag will persist and can be reused. It is not a master tag so it won't appear in the tag dropdown in the Tags for other users, but it will for you. Photos can be searched for using this tag if it is known. You can remove items if you "overdid it"... if you didn't get them all in (eg. you have relevant photos in different locations on your device), you can just hit "Select Photos" button again, navigate/select more photos. On save, they'll be added to the list.
Once "Save" is clicked, you then get back to the "Edit Photo Album" Sheet:
Now that you're here, if there is additional info you want to add to your photo... eg. a better title, date taken, a funny caption etc. you can edit each and every individual photo in the list. Clicking the trash-can item in right hand controls, will NOT delete the photo from the system... it will only remove it's reference from the album. It is unknown at this time, if the display sequence will translate over to other photo albums if/when these photos are referenced elsewhere, assuming it's been changed. So editing the first photo (clicking on the "pencil" icon) entry looks like this:
So you can see here we modified the caption field (which was blank since this field is not present in the multiple add wizard). Naturally all of these fields can be modified.
At this point you would contact the coordinator team either through e-mail or via a forum post (former might be more reliable!) asking for linking your photos to the appropriate launch album. The minimal required information is the name of the photo album, and whether or not you wish for this album to persist. If you choose to keep this album around for reuse after future launches. It would be MOST helpful if you do choose this option, to use unique tags for subsequent uploads.
How to use photo selection
Let's suppose that you upload your photos to your "permanent" photo album, but you want some of these shots in another album for the coordinator to select into the club launch album. This is reasonably easy to do, starting with our recently created photo album. Start as before, by going to your user profile under your user id on the upper right hand side of your browser, and scroll down to the photo album link to the lower right (first three steps at the top of this page). This brings you to the Photo Album Manager. We already have an album there named Album 1, so we press the "Add Photo Album" button:
Again only name and menu text are required fields. Clicking save gives us the following result:
Now we edit (pencil icon) the new album "Launch Inclusions..."
This time, we press "Select Photos"...
If you press "Show Photos" now, without putting in a title, you'll see all of the photos you uploaded/own... regardless of their state... i.e. whether they are in a photo album or not, all the photos you own will show up here if they are unfiltered. We used a tag for the launch shots we uploaded earlier... so we can use that tag name here to select ONLY those shots we just uploaded... The tag we used was "cmassuser-2025-03-15-launch" but we don't even need to use the full string. Here only the first part of the string was used for filtering. Mind you this can be risky if someone else used the same string. This does illustrate however, the convenience of tagging your photos for easier management.
Clicking each entry will give you a preview of the photo as illustrated above. Pushing the select button now will link this (and ONLY this) photo to the album you are currently editing. If you want ALL in the new album, <ctrl>-left-mouse-click on each entry you want to add, THEN press select. In this case all were selected and the resulting photo album is identical to the original.
